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For generations, the residents of Lowndes County, Ala. — a rural, mostly Black community bordering Montgomery — have lacked access to adequate sanitation. Many people funnel the sewage from their homes directly into their backyards, where it pools atop the dense, clay-like soil. The area has seen a resurgence of hookworm, which thrives in areas with poor sanitation. The parasite can drain people of their energy and impair cognitive development in children.
Lowndes is hardly the only place in America plagued with sanitation problems, but during the Biden administration, the county’s plight has become a symbol of environmental racism.
In May the Justice Department announced it had reached an interim agreement after an investigation revealed evidence of racial discrimination in the county’s ongoing sanitation crisis. The agreement will require Alabama’s Department of Public Health to stop imposing fines on residents who cannot afford functioning septic systems, and it will develop a plan to improve access to adequate sanitation infrastructure.
By almost any measure, this is a substantive win for environmental justice. The question is whether it will augur a broader change in how the federal government addresses environmental racism.
Activists are hopeful, but for some 30 years, progress has proved elusive. For decades, Democrats have talked about using a “whole-government approach” to reduce the environmental hazards that so many minority communities face. In 1994, President Bill Clinton signed an executive order to address environmental justice and ensure that low-income citizens and minorities do not suffer a disproportionate burden of industrial pollution.
But the order was not thoroughly enforced. Had federal agencies taken more action then, some of the worst public health crises of recent years might have been avoided: from the sewage buildups in Alabama to the contamination of tap water in communities like Flint, Mich., and Jackson, Miss. Federal action could also have mitigated the risks for disease in places like Louisiana’s “Cancer Alley.”
Instead, minority communities throughout the United States have continued to suffer disproportionately. A 2019 study found that white Americans experience an average of 17 percent less air pollution than the amount generated by the goods and services they consume — while African Americans breathe in 56 percent more air pollution than they’re responsible for.
The Biden administration has moved to right past wrongs. In April the president announced that he was renewing Mr. Clinton’s order from 1994 — and at the same time, he established an Office of Environmental Justice at the White House, which will quarterback the federal government’s efforts to help minority communities that suffer major health burdens. This time around, there will also be an Environmental Justice Scorecard, designed to concretely measure what each federal agency is doing — so the departments can be held to certain benchmarks.
There have been other signs of substantive progress as well. The White House is seizing on the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law as a chance to fund environmental justice projects. At least $1 billion has been allocated for a pilot program that will aim to reconnect neighborhoods racially segregated by highway construction and road projects — like in downtown Detroit, where planners hope to tear down an interstate spur and replace it with a pedestrian-friendly boulevard. Another $55 billion will go toward replacing waterworks in communities like Jackson, where a boil-water advisory was in effect for nearly two months last year. The government will channel $21 billion toward cleaning up contaminated sites and another $100 million toward pollution prevention, in a program focused on “underserved and overburdened” communities.
As for the settlement in Lowndes, it’s a shining example of what a whole-government approach can look like in practice. The federal agencies have the power to withhold funding sources to states that engage in racial discrimination, in violation of the Civil Rights Act. Vernice Miller-Travis, the executive vice president of a social-justice organization called the Metropolitan Group, has been involved for more than a decade in efforts to push the Department of Justice and the Environmental Protection Agency to act on this issue. She’s been surprised by how proactive the Biden administration has been.
“If you had asked me to predict how these issues would be addressed in this administration,” she said, “I would never have said to you, ‘This will be the most aggressive pursuit of environmental justice by a presidential administration in my lifetime.’”
Still, some of the compromises Mr. Biden made in the recent debt-ceiling negotiations have infuriated environmental activists. In particular, the president agreed to fast-track the Mountain Valley Pipeline, which is designed to carry natural gas across a 300-mile stretch between West Virginia and Virginia. The project has already encroached on Indigenous land, and activists argue that it will lead to more pollution, which can lead to health complications like asthma, heart attacks and lung cancer in Black communities like the Banister district in Virginia.
Amy Laura Cahn, the legal director of the environmentalist group Taproot Earth, argues that it’s too early to draw major conclusions from the settlement in Alabama. “It is a clear win for Lowndes County, and I hope for the people of Alabama overall,” she said. “What does it mean for environmental justice more broadly? We have to wait and see.”
Nick Tabor is a freelance journalist and the author of “Africatown: America’s Last Slave Ship and the Community It Created.”
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